I know this won't be appreciated as a post, but I wanted to point out that, to me, the new digg.com website has been very successful at highlighting the thought-provoking articles that I would typically look for on truereddit.

I only see a couple of articles a day posted to truereddit that have more than a couple comments. It seems like the sub picks one story to comment on en masse and ignores the rest of them for the most part. Usually the one picked isn't exactly a thought provoking topic either.

Feedly for Chrome and mobile devices does a pretty good job of sorting your content into categories. I honestly use that much more than reddit these days because I can tailor it to only include credible sources, and not blog spam or articles with overblown titles and rhetoric in order to get page views. The only thing I regularly use reddit for now is discussion heavy subreddits for topics I'm interested in (like /r/movies and /r/cfb). The majority of the site in my opinion has been compromised for a while now to the political insights of high school kids, conspiratorial conjecture, and sometimes outright racism. Remember how we all made fun of YouTube commenters a few years ago? Well, most them are here now. A community is only as good as its users.

Feedly does aggregate articles based on popularity. Personally I find aggregation to be pretty annoying most of the time. I'd much rather have a feed from sources I like and make decisions on what I find interesting myself.

That's my favorite part! How many brain cells have we wasted on internet comments? Take this one for example, are you smarter for having read it? I guarantee that you are not because I just got stupider writing it.

I feel like while I generally tune into Reddit both for insightful stuff I'd never see otherwise, and stuff that can make me feel indignant or get my blood boil, it's probably better for my health and time management if I can cut down the prevalence of the latter in my life. It may be better for me to spend more time on a site with less conversation and more high-level content.

Yeah, it's great when websites can decide whether one of their goals is cultivating a community, and to allow certain forms of community participation if they decide to go that direction. But when the comments section is just a wasteland of hate or ignorance (and no group has a monopoly on either of those things), it's just a pointless drag.

This is a trend that I wish other popular news sites would follow, in particular those that run articles that are even tangentially related to politics. It's nearly impossible to find an article's comment section these days that hasn't been shit all over by some tea party trolls who have nothing to contribute but name calling, logical fallacies, and outright lies.

I think it is good that Digg has finally found its place. After all, this subreddit was created as the answer to "[The] Digg [exodus] is destroying reddit" comments, to recreate the "True" reddit feeling, albeit with the knowledge that there cannot be a True Scotsman. With your headline, the circle is completed.

Let me point out why I think that TR can be better than Digg, even if they become more truereddit-ish: as a community, we have the possibility to find great articles even on an obscure blog deep down on an unknown domain if only one member has read that article and submits it. There are not only 10 or 20 editors but 10,000. As long as the majority plays fair, great articles rise to the top.

This very submission also points out TR's Kryptonite. We can make exceptions for whatever content we deem more interesting than a great article.

I know this won't be appreciated as a post

TR can only be as good as the community makes it. I think this submission is a good exception as it is full of great articles, but please remember: TR is a sharp knife, there is no moderator who takes back your decision by removing bad submissions.

*edit: btw, there is /r/MetaTrueReddit for those who want more meta discussions about TR.

After all, this subreddit was created as the answer to "[The] Digg [exodus] is destroying reddit" comments,

I don't know how long you've been a mod here for, but I've been a TR subscriber since it began, and that was well before the Digg exodus. The "true" feeling was initially felt lost when the programming community's grip on reddit began to let loose.

Seems like the past becomes blury. In my mind, I have used "This does not belong into reddit, go back to Digg" comments to write invitations for the true reddit. Maybe it was before the big exodus, but Digg was already supposed to destroy reddit. But you may also be right and I may have made that up.

IMO, the best part about TR is the fact that mods are actual accounts/people.

On digg, they were "invisible" and had zero accountability. Accounts would get banned with zero explanation and you'd have to try to guess why it happened. Submissions were censored without telling you why but it appeared they sometimes did it to avoid pissing off corporate sponsors.

On reddit, the rules are very clear and they vary by subreddit if you don't like the rules in the sub you're currently in.

In hindsight, the version of Digg that I left is better than the current overall reddit. Truereddit still has some interest for me, but not a whole lot. All comments, submissions, photos, etc. still (overall in reddit as a whole) are geared toward, 'Look at me, look how funny I can be, aren't I clever) and, in my opinion, that's the hallmark of the idiocracy.

Exactly. I'm proud of what reddit has accomplished in the past, but current reddit is filled with too much attention whoring by people who think they need to be important to be a good contributing member of the community.

There's some choice subs that are pretty damn great though, and they aren't "Secret" or "hidden" by any means. The communities are large, full of debate, and most importantly a revolving door of new and interesting content. Check em' /r/scotch, /r/nba, /r/malefashionadvice

Of those, MFA gets shit on probably the most and I'm not sure why. The users admit to getting tired of seeing the same looks when that happens, they advise against "dadwear" for users who aren't out of high school, and are pretty open to most styles. As a plus, they are really into anonymizing photos so nobody can indirectly become a reddit model so to your point about users feeling they need to be famous before contributing.

I'm a mod for /r/paradoxplaza, a medium sized subreddit. A way we stop it from being an echo chamber is by allowing various competing material from other game companies into the discussion. We casted the net very wide.

However, the issue is that only moderators can stop things from being an echo chamber of uninteresting content. The only way that moderators know that something is inherently wrong is through feedback.

You can let this be known by making a post on the subreddit, but it probably won't get attention. The best thing to do is message the mods.

When you have a lot of mods, like in /r/askscience, you will notice high quality content due to the near-constant filtering.

More than just the karma system but the fact that people who don't agree with the prevailing opinions on one subreddit can just split off and make their own subreddit and create their own echo chamber to agree with themselves. Allowing people to make their own user moderated boards is brilliant it's one of the strongest features of Reddit, but the natural consequence is that users self-divide into subgroups along ideological, political, religious and other lines in order to avoid encountering anyone who might disagree with them on any issues. The echo chamber is entirely user created and to some degree we're all guilty of it. Looking at myself I know I certainly don't sub to any religious, political, or other subreddits that I know go against my existing opinions. It was never a conscious decision. It just happens.

Even subreddits designed for debate are more like echo chambers than discussion sites. It is so hard to get an unpopular opinion to stay near the top and almost impossible to have it at the top no matter how well written.

I wonder, are the attention whores a specific mass of people that migrate in or do the individuals in the community change their behavior depending on its scale? Or rather, how much is one or the other? Are "attention whores" in one place the "thoughtful contributors" in another? If it's really mostly migration and not transformation, why are the thoughtful contributors seemingly always the early adopters?

Why would the 'thoughtful contributors' not be expected to be the first in and out? They would be the ones looking for something apart from the masses who themselves would not be as likely to leave something that already provides them with the culture and approval they seek. Why would this type of people leave for something niche and quieter?

As for what kind of people the 'thoughtful contributors' are, I imagine that does change depending on the topic. Obviously some people are going to take easily consumed media for their humour but dive deeply into hydroponics or something and treat that very seriously. Then there will be people on either extreme. In that sense reddit as it is can be seen as a good thing in my eyes; there is a lot of crap on the site, but with some careful subreddit selection a relatively high level of discourse can still be held and my interests fulfilled, mainly because fragmentation of userbase is still internal with people retreating to new subreddits rather than a new website entirely (I imagine, maybe Digg will be the new (old) place to be).

That's exactly what you have to do. Reddit is what you make it. I just looked at the raw front page for the first time in months, and was literally repulsed at the inane bullshit that people post to the major subreddits.

I used to visit Slashdot multiple times a day but grew more and more frustrated with the poor quality of many of the stories, which were often full of flat-out incorrect information, and with the often sub-high-school-level writing of the moderators. There was finally one story that broke the camel's back (a diatribe about Apple's DRM that was full of technical errors and was horribly written) and I decided I'd had enough. That was in 2007 and aside from accidentally clicking on a few links to /. articles my friends have posted on Facebook, I haven't been back since.

I wish you would. I've been looking for a reddit replacement for a while.

Agreed. This is how the "worthwhile portion" of a community stays more or less in a cohesive unit - by sharing information with each other.

It's a comment 4 layers deep in a post on a mid-level subreddit. It's not like it's being screamed from the mountain tops. That's pretty much how I found reddit for the first time, deep in the comments of some obscure Slashdot story. It just happened to be right when I was looking to move elsewhere. :-)

Comments are a really hard problem to solve, so we’re taking time to make sure we do it right. In the coming weeks and months we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.

This is in the FAQ, though the FAQ has not been updated since 12 November 2012.

Redneck liberal who grew up in a gun-totin', hunting family here. I (and the majority of my family) favor moderate gun control and extensive background checks. Very few of us carry defensively, or even have CC permits, but we believe that there is a place for those permits, when coupled with rigorous training and licensing requirements. The vast majority of people should be able to pass these requirements with no issue, but screening for criminal record, mental health, and the demonstrated capacity to handle a modern firearm safely should be mandatory, in my opinion.

I also have no problem at all with regulating more extreme weapons, such as high-capacity magazines, although I am a realist and acknowledge that such regulation would only affect a relatively small percentage of crimes.

So yeah, people who lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum do exist.

Here, let me find a few anecdotes from your post history that support my claim, even though they don't necessarily disprove yours, post them and then call your observations bullshit. And I'll call myself a scientist for extra neckbeard points.

Completely agree. I find the smaller the subreddit, the more I tend to enjoy my time on it. I think there are still a lot of parts worth while on Reddit but it's just a matter of finding what suits the reader.

Whenever I recommend friends to the site that is what I say to them now. Rather then going to reddit.com I tell them to find subreddits that are more relevant to their interests and they will (hopefully) have a more enjoyable experience.

I think the best thing about the new digg is the lack of comments - or at least the lack of prominent commenting. Comments can be incredibly interesting or useful at times, the other 50% of the time, it's a one-liner joke that gets the most upvotes.

That's true for one-liners, too. As I am trying to maintain TR as a community that doesn't want to be protected from itself, I am wondering if it would be interesting to introduce a policy that collects one-liners and 'tweets' below one root-comment. Then, the root-comment could be folded by those who don't want to read them, leaving the remaining comment section for high-signal comments.

People writing one-liners are motivated in the same way thoughtful commenters are: they want their comments to be seen. No one's going to volunteer to segregate their comment into an explicitly low quality ghetto.

That seems simplistic. While no one wants their comments to be completely ignored, it seems like the thoughtful commenters tend to value the quality of discussion as a whole rather than just wanting the most basic form of attention. That's why we take the trouble to actually explain our position rather than just making the quickest grab for karma.

I agree that's true all things being equal, but with such a rule in place, one-liners outside the ghetto are more likely to be downvoted to oblivion by the community and criticized for ignoring the rule. It would obviously take a critical mass of users enforcing the rule to overwhelm the users upvoting the one-liners in the first place, but maybe the community here is interested enough in separating one-liners from thoughtful comments to make it work.

We need some way to classify the different kinds of comments. Funny, Intelligent, inane, controversial. Then I can just turn off the jokes without having to scroll through page after page of stupid blathering.

Most of the time they don't even read the thread first so there are 20 or 30 variations on the joke.

But that makes trying to be funny a core and essential part of commenting on Reddit. If anything, a large part of the problem facing Reddit that people attach such importance to trying to be funny. There is a time and a place for it.

What about weighting upvotes for longer posts more than shorter ones? There might have to be some measures to prevent gaming the system, but I think a lot of the problems would be taken care of by the users down voting people that add in whitespace or nonsense simply for length.

It's the bane of any eventual popularity/commercialization. It's the same for big Youtubers, and is something beyond their control. When you're a small Youtuber, you get to talk with your subscribers one to one, and often times the comments there are more insightful. As you become bigger, the level of communication becomes nearly impossible, and the level of crap comments become much higher.

I was on Metafilter prior to Reddit's creation, and for what I knew of the internet 8 years ago, I considered it to be A rare island of intelligent commentary on the internet, particularly compared to the early reddit.

Now it's kind of dumb to me, and in the right subreddit's the level of discussion is higher, and more active than anywhere else I know of. If you're pissed about the quality of commentary on Reddit, you're not looking in the right places.

I've about finished with /r/truereddit, though. It's overrun with people who pretend to know what they're discussing, rather than making a silly comment and then deferring deeper insight to those who have it. It's overrun with bullshitters, which is far worse than 'Look at me I'm clever!'

I don't completely disbelieve them, but I think they're exaggerating the decline of quality of comments here at that time. True Reddit only really tanked in the past couple of years, before that time most of the comments were quite reasonable and informative. Yes it's possible they met one user who engaged in argumentation based on semantics or whatever but that was hardly characteristic of the quality of discussion here at that time.

The truth is that TR was formed just shortly below the Digg invasion. I seriously doubt the number of subscribers at the time they're referring to could have been more than about 20K, and in general folks were very respectful here back then.

As someone who primarily hangs out at MetaFilter I find the Redditor attitude that it's "dumb" confusing. I've spent a bunch of time digging around looking for good subreddits where smart discussion takes place, and even the really obscure and intellectual/political/philosophical subs that I frequent are often rife with misogyny (see below), Engineer's Syndrome dismissiveness and pugnacious internet "experts" holding forth, and really really dumb poop/sex jokes. MeFi has more of a single site culture and active moderation, for sure, and it's by no means as smart a community as it sometimes self-congratulatorily thinks it is — but the moderation really helps cut down on the noise and stupidity and misogyny and keep the place receptive to actual discussion compared to the weird point-missing, lame jokery, and hyperfocused derails around here.

Reddit, too, seems like a place that thinks it's smarter than it is just because it's not YouTube comments. Or to put it another way, where are these subs where the level of the discussion is so unparalleled? I haven't seen them.

My problem with Metafilter is how easily discussions get derailed by low-level trolling. If one person expresses a conservative or slightly prejudiced point of view, it's practically guaranteed a significant part of the rest of the thread will be devoted to carefully explaining to them why they're misguided.

And personally I'm the kind of guy who doesn't really like getting involved in those kinds of threads unless I've read the entirety of the previous comments, so I spend a lot more time reading thread derails and repetitive comments, memes, etc rather than actually engaging in discussion. Compared to reddit where for some reason I tend to not give a fuck whether my comment is redundant or whatever -- I guess if it doesn't contribute to discussion hopefully it will just get downvoted.

It is true that even in the subreddits with highest quality of discussion the groupthink is taking over (eg /r/philosophy). Some of the smaller subreddits that are exclusively discussion-oriented are still pretty good, I'm thinking here of /r/InsightfulQuestions.

I find it interesting that you mention Hacker News, since that place suffers from the same problem of being overrun with people who pretend to know what they're talking about. The difference is that the people there are even more opinionated than the people on TrueReddit.

I guess. There's always a lot of really opinionated people, but some of them really are experts, and the rate at which you will run into the genuine people is higher than most other places (it seems to me at least).

There is no need for secrecy as long as a subreddit is small. I am trying to help the moderators to establish /r/TruerReddit as a subreddit for HN type technical articles but the people of which you are afraid, will only subscribe when there are 200,000 members. Then, you can move on to /r/TruerrReddit. /r/privvit has tried secrecy, to no avail. It is almost impossible to attract enough members on reddit for a secret subreddit.

You just have to pick your subs. There are only a few that I actually read. Whenever a sub gets too circle-jerky, or I see too many stupid pictures with titles like, "So I heard you like pictures of lime jello" or whatever, I unsub.

I want to say the same, but I really don't remember how reddit was when I arrived. Maybe I was not used to all those sob stories about grand pa dying from cancer or adopting disabled dogs so it didn't bother me that much. Also maybe meme was kind of a new thing and I really wanted to get on the boat.

Maybe we just became tired of all of this culture?

by the way, one of the most interesting subreddit I've seen for a while has been /r/mildlyinteresting

I was never on digg or reddit back then, I was too busy. I feel sad that I missed out on reddit in its heyday. And I'm guilty of many useless comments. As someone else said in this thread, I'll go to other sites for thought provoking articles, but come back to reddit to be dumbed down.

I used to do the 4chan/reddit/damninteresting circuit, then reddit filled all those niches, then reddit went too far, and now I'm stuck here with no idea where the "old reddit" experience can be found and no willingness to find out. Maybe I'll try Digg

Hacker News has its own problems, which have been highlighted in depth over the past few days.

A case in point is the retrospective submission of the old "Show HN" post of Dropbox. The dismissive nature of HN shows perfectly in that post, with the now-infamous top comments stating that Dropbox wouldn't take off because its purpose can be filled by FTPing or hosting your own server.

I like Hacker News, but it's near impossible to take the community seriously at times. It was summed up well by someone a few days ago that said "it's white-collar workers laughing at blue-collar workers in a blue-collar industry".

I do admit Digg has very insightful articles these days. It's pretty much my main source of interesting internet reads these days. Reddit has fallen behind, opting for terrible one-lining puns. I keep looking for good subs to subscribe to, but so far, nothing is still near the level of polish. When you have a number of people people do the voting, it's going to skew the quality of articles.

I also notice that comments I take time to write because it's a meta-analysis of the article truly get ignored. Those chippy one-liners I write that really have no substance and take two seconds to write because they're that brainless get the most upvotes. It's quite sad.

To be honest this post seems geared more towards /r/TheoryOfReddit, though there isn't a whole lot to discuss about it as it's pretty simple.

Reddit was popular and Digg made a mistake, thus lots of people jumped ship. As reddit increased in popularity it became more and more "mainstream" meaning that a lot of people who don't give a damn started posting any random crap (see memes, puns, whatever) and reddit's default boards lost the magic that they once had. Anybody else remember when Novelty accounts were novel in that they were original and only a few people did it? Now everybody has one or two and they aren't original most of the time.

In the meantime Digg's remained much smaller meaning that it retained some of what reddit has lost.

Pocket is a Read it Later client... Instapaper is essentially the exact same thing. I knew about Instapaper before Read It later, so I use Instapaper more, but I don't think there's much of a difference between them (except that Read It Later is nicely integrated with longform.org, which is why I started using it as well).

I'd recommend you give something like Readability a shot. You can get a plugin for your browser that will save any page to your account, either in its regular form or in a "readable" one, with everything but text and images removed. Readability/Instapaper/Pocket work on pretty much every site, so you can use Digg and reddit side-by-side and save the articles to the same place. Plus, Digg has integration with all of them, so you can still use the save button on Digg to save to whichever service you use.

There's not a lot to worry about using your Facebook or Twitter on Digg, though. There's no commenting and voting doesn't really do anything since the frontpage is controlled by their editors.

And when the IPO comes out the investors usually rig the system (by having insider info, pricing tricks or so) to get out with cash at the most favourable moment and petty retail investors loose their life savings.

I think it's their overall corporate vibe, right from doing business - raising money - IPO, is something that feels unacceptable.

I don't know how ethical or moral twitter is, but I would personally avoid them simply for being so large. And American. American entities are very untrustworthy. Especially online. Granted, reddit is no better on that front, but I'm already here and I avoid putting anything serious or personal on Reddit.

I've actually been browsing Digg as an alternate for a while now, like maybe 9 months or whenever they did the most recent site design.

There's some good content on there usually every day, the format is nice both on a desktop and mobile browser, the lack of comments makes it a much healthier habit and stops it from consuming me like reddit does if I let it.

My only gripe is that some sites seem to be on there every other day so the whole thing feels a bit bought and paid for but I didn't expect anything else from digg.

After leaving digg for reddit 5 or 6 years ago it's kind of funny to come back to it, a completely different site, but still to come back to it.

I've arrived at a point where I'm not trying to "fix" reddit anymore, at least not as a "big picture" idea. Reddit is perfect at what it tries to be. It's perfect as user-voted content and commentary with a simple structure and thus a large and busy enough following to actually comb through most of the web to find the content that matters. If you add filtering by subscribing only to the subreddits which suit your interests, it's pretty much as good as it gets. You might be able to tweak it with some ranking algorithm fixes there, some obvious features here… but all in all, it works!

Why does Digg now have sometimes better content? Because the new Digg is an entirely different content aggregation model. It has no comments, a more spacious web 3.0-y front page, it's facebook/twitter-only, only has upvote buttons (essentially "likes") and last but not least it's heavily guided by mod authority. Its interactivity level is essentially that of your average "online newspaper". And maybe that's a good thing. It's just that it is an entirely different goal than what reddit attempts.

We're all very, very familiar with reddit's shortcomings and they're part of the model. But it's also the best "true" entirely user-aggregated content model out there. It might not be as stylish or elegant as the redesigned Digg, but /r/truereddit can keep up with the Digg frontpage all day and that's just a tiny slice of reddit. We can't change reddit anymore than the gradual tweaks we've seen over the past 3 or 5 years, otherwise it would go against the whole point.

I still plain find reddit more interesting as a project. It might be replaced by something else, soon, but Digg, IMO, isn't it. Digg might have interesting stories on its frontpage but as a project, it's boring now. Whatever will follow reddit will be quite radically different… or weirdly similar (neither facebook, youtube, google or reddit itself were the first of their kind).

I don't think that's a bad thing. My time on reddit has convinced me that user curated content is doomed to fail at a large scale. The best subreddits, the ones that don't descend into /r/politics stupidity, are almost always heavily modded.

That was my initial reaction to the new Digg, but I've since changed my opinion and rarely visit any more. I just got sick of regularly seeing articles full of misinformation, with there being no comment section for people to point that out.

Even worse, it seems to have at least a couple blogspam articles daily, from the same providers (Gawker, Buzzfeed, and others) that are one-sided and poorly sourced at best and complete bullshit at worst. It makes me think they are paying for their spot there, and that's in addition to the articles that are marked "Sponsored".

The stories are no longer submitted by users. It is done by the maintainers of the Digg website. Furthermore, I find a large share of their political and sociological stories to be hopelessly politically biased, replete with smarmy subheadings. They become much less interesting as a result.

I was really into it for awhile, but with a few exceptions, most of the stuff I'd want to read pops up here or on some other subs anyway.

I think it's the fact that it's curated. I've also been using digg.com as a site for insightful articles. Then I punch the link into reddit to see if it's been submitted already so I can look for comments.

All of the articles you've listed are from major news sources. The reason I never really got into digg was because major content providers were essentially just paying for position which is really stupid. I'm concerned that this remains the case.

I tried out the new Digg as my homepage for a few months. In ny experience the content tended more toward mental candy than hard, interesting pieces. To each their own, though, and of course it could be different now.

Reddit just happens to be more popular, which will necessarily attract all sorts of people. Back when I was on Digg (2005-2007?) it was pretty good, but I found the submissions and comments to be somewhat more focused on humor/memes as it got more popular and attracted younger people. Reddit's main strength is primarily in the emphasis on sub-Reddits, which offers places like, well, here.

I've also noticed the interesting content on Digg recently. It's been 3 years to the day since I followed the mass Digg exodus and joined Reddit.

I liked Digg until the point they ruined it. I can sort of understand them wanting to find better ways to monetize, but that should never be at the expense of the needs and desires of the community, not when your entire site depends on community driven content. But that wasn't really what made me leave, it was the fact that in attempting to change, they broke the site, and broke it bad. I hung in there for a few days until it had become a joke.
It would be sad to see Reddit make a similar mistake. There's already so much to complain about here. I do find the multireddits to be a big help though, allowing me to keep all the crap in one place, and the interesting stuff in another, but not ever have to feel I'm missing out on anything. I've unsubbed a lot of the defaults and subbed a lot of minor subreddits as a result.

I installed their app on my phone a few months ago, and i'm very pleased by some of the articles i've come across. Seems we've come full circle, but don't say that too loudly or they'll all be back on Digg.

BetaWorks bought digg.com. They basically just bought the URL and the idea of a "digg". The pretty much threw out the old site and started over from scratch. Considering what a shit storm Digg v4 was, and Kevin saying it was impossible to revert back to v3, it seems like starting over was the right move.

Something I never thought I'd say but I find myself really looking forward to their daily e-mail. Nice quick thoughtfully curated list of articles that make great material for public transportation reading.

Digg is actually way better than truereddit now, I've been going there for months at times I actually want to read good articles. Now that truereddit has morphed into /r/politics there's not much for me here anymore.

When you sign in to Digg Reader with Google, it makes you accept that info, including your Google Reader info, be used. That's reassuring, because I use Google Reader daily! I hope it can, like, mesh with Digg and make Google Reader even better!